Macklin wrote down the address. ‘I might bring Philippe along as well,’ he added, apparently as an after thought.
‘Club Philippe?’
‘The very same. Night off from running his beloved ristorante. We’re having a pint after work.’
‘Oh.’
‘So,’ Macklin said, ‘around ten suit you?’
‘Around ten sounds fine.’
It was the last thing he felt like doing. A night out with Macklin, d’Erlanger and a Russian Mr Fixit, characterized by Tom’s gradually deteriorating behaviour, the four of them just another set of suits in early middle-age ogling girls and stinking of booze and fags. Vladimir probably wouldn’t speak much English, so the evening would consist of shouted, stop-start conversations about ‘Manchester United’ and ‘Mr Winston Churchill’. Slowly, Macklin would lose what few moral scruples he possessed and demonstrate the full range of his aggressive sexism, culminating in their inevitable ejection from the club at two or three in the morning. Then one of them — Macklin, most probably — would pass out on the street before Mark had a chance to put him in a cab. Why had he agreed to go? So that Tom wouldn’t thinkhe was boring? It was something to do with the aftermath of his father’s death; Mark just didn’t have time for this kind of thing any more.
He took a taxi to the Paddington flat. The heating was on high in the back of the cab and when Mark stepped out to pay the driver a January wind caught him like a blast of ice in the face. He took out a set of keys — the ones his father had used — and opened the door to the lobby.
Grey, bleak light was leaking in from the street. Ahead of him, Mark could barely make out the stairwell or the entrance to the lift. He pressed the white plastic timer switch on the wall beside the door, blinking as the foyer lights came on. It seemed odd, but he could sense his father’s presence here, his routine of checking the mail, that stubborn habit he had of taking the stairs and not the lift. Got to keep fit at my age, he would say. Got to look after the old lungs. One time they had come backfor a whisky after eating dinner in Islington and Keen had spent five minutes standing at the foot of the stairs talking to a widower named Max who lived on the first floor. Where was Max now? Maybe Mark should knock on his door and talkto him about what had happened, ask if he had heard or seen anything on the night of the murder. He would rather do that, rather be with someone who had known his father, than spend five hours with Macklin and an anonymous Russian lawyer in a lap-dancing club in the West End. But the police would have already talked to him. No doubt, like everybody else in the building, Max hadn’t seen or heard a thing.
He rode the lift to the fourth floor. The police still weren’t certain whether his father’s killer had reached the flat that way, or via the stairs. There were so few clues, so little evidence around which to base even a theory.
A teenager wearing baggy denims and a black puffa jacket passed him in the corridor as he came out of the lift and made his way to Apartment 462. Mark was just a few metres away from the door when he saw that it was already open. There were lights on inside and he stopped in his tracks. A faint shadow fell slowly across the floor, and then the door abruptly closed. There were no voices, no clues as to the identity of the intruder. Kathy, the Family Liaison Officer, had told Mark that the police had long ago finished their investigation. He moved forward, inhaled deeply and pressed his ear to the door.
Nothing. Not a sound. Whoever was inside was alone and remaining deliberately quiet. The wild thought occurred to him that the killer had returned to the scene of the crime. Again Mark breathed deeply and slid his key into the lock, banking on an element of surprise. Then, with great speed and no thought to his own safety, he opened the door.
Ben was standing in the kitchen, looking out of the window.
‘Brother. Jesus. What are you doing here?’
Ben turned round. He looked to be in a trance.
‘Hi,’ he said very quietly, unfazed by the sudden intrusion. He looked back at the window. ‘You took most of his stuff.’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ Mark said, breathing quickly. ‘To get the rest of it. How did you get in?’
‘Spare set of keys. Kathy gave them to me. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Why would I mind? You can come here whenever you like.’
‘It’s just that I wanted to see the place for myself.’
‘Sure you did.’
Mark looked towards the sitting room. He had not expected to feel this, but his brother’s presence was an intrusion, an unnecessary complication he could do without. To make matters worse, Ben was clearly adrift in self-pity, one of the least attractive elements of his personality. For three weeks Mark had wanted to shake him free of gloom, to move him on.
‘So what’s left to take?’
There was an almost combative tone to Ben’s question.
‘Clothes, mostly,’ Mark told him. ‘Some suits. A couple of pictures…’
‘Yeah, I saw those.’
‘And there’s a box of papers underneath his desk. Bank statements. Insurance records mostly. Dad didn’t keep a diary or anything, so none of it’s any good to the police. I was going to take them home.’
‘Fine.’
There was a prolonged silence. Mark scuffed his shoes against the kitchen’s linoleum and thought about moving next door. When Ben spoke, his voice was removed, almost hypnotic.
‘They say that when your father dies, it’s actually quite liberating. The intercessionary figure has been taken out of the picture. There’s supposed to be this feeling of transcendence.’
‘So is that what you feel? Liberated by what’s happened? Transcendent?’
I don’t have time for this, Mark thought. Not now. Not tonight.
‘It’s funny,’ Ben went on, ignoring the question. ‘I remember when we were children, when Dad first left, I had these feelings of guilt about it that went on for so long… It was as if everything was my fault, you know? We used to talk about this, you and me, don’t you remember?’
Mark nodded. Ben was still looking out of the window, waiting for the moment to turn. It might almost have been a performance, a stage picture. From the fourth floor there was nothing to see but swathes of grey sky and a clutter of roofs.
Ben carried on: ‘It got to be ridiculous. I started to think that if I’d behaved better, eaten what was put in front of me, not cried so much as a child, that Dad wouldn’t have left like he did. But what kind of shit is that to be thinking? It was his fault, not mine. It tookme a long time to realize that.’
‘Me too,’ Mark said instinctively, as if it would help.
‘I had a kind of fantasy of reunion right up until my late teens. Like he would just suddenly reappear and beg our forgiveness. Turn up at school and say everything was going to be all right and then take us out for lunch at Garfunkel’s. Did you ever have that?’
Mark shook his head.
‘Maybe it would have been easier if Mum had had a boyfriend, someone that could have replaced him. I always felt that her life was structured to avoid pain after that, you know? I think that’s why she never remarried.’
Mark made a gesture of understanding, something with his face that he hoped would seem empathetic. In his experience, this kind of talk went nowhere. It was just the theorizing of the artist, the amateur psychologist enjoying his private confession. He thought for a moment that Ben might have been drinking.
‘You getting much work done?’ he asked, trying to steer him off the subject. ‘How’s the picture of that girl going, the good-looking one? What’s the deal on the exhibition?’
But Ben just ignored him.
‘It never occurred to me until the other day that Mum might still have been in love with Dad.’ He lit a cigarette and exhaled very slowly. ‘Do you think that’s possible? Do you think, even after everything that happened, that a woman could still love a man after being treated that way? It’s not beyond the realms of possibility…’